Beginning in the 18th century, technological advancements in forging metals that could hold sharp edges when formed into knife blades inaugurated significant alteration of the design, manufacture, and use of knives. What had been primitive tools started to become diverse, formidable, and even elegant implements. In recent decades, advancements in knife manufacturing technology have accelerated. Numerous companies and individuals now are devoted exclusively to design and manufacture of a wide variety of knives for work, sport, and collecting.
In the 21st century, many blades are manufactured from stainless steel, particularly martensitic stainless steels. Most blades include a wide variety of chromium that imparts corrosion resistance, and carbon, that provides hardening of a knife blade by heat treatment. Edge retention of knife blades has increased with the formulation of higher carbon content; corrosion resistance has increased by the use of higher chromium content.
The degree to which knife blades are treated for edge retention, corrosion resistance, and hardening depends at least in part on the uses for a particular knife. Modern knives have a variety of distinctive uses. The blade of a knife is the major determining factor in the work to which a knife and knife blade may be applied. The blade also is the chief concern in connection with safety in using a knife. Cost of a knife is a function, then, of the quality of the blade steel, workmanship, material used in forming a handle for the knife, and ornamentation. A knife blade generally is forged from steel into a desired shape, hardened and tempered, ground to a cutting edge, polished to remove all traces of forging and heat treatment, and fitted to a handle. A wide variety of materials is used for handles, including horns and tusks, various woods, bone, and now an array of synthetic materials.
A major threshold factor, in the choice of a knife is between a fixed-blade or a folding knife. Folding knives, also called “folders,” usually are selected on the basis of the intended use and user preference. An exemplary holder for a folding tool, including a folding knife, is disclosed and claimed in pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/327,720 filed by the inventor named in this document on Nov. 20, 2002, and for which the U.S. Patent Office has issued a notice of allowability.
The apparatus disclosed and claimed in this document includes a holder for a non-folding tool such as a variably positionable sheath allowing removal of a fixed-blade knife, also known as an open knife, from, and insertion of a fixed-blade knife into, the sheath using only one hand. The term “fixed-blade” knife, as used in this document includes fixed blade, open blade, and unitary knives.
Fixed-blade knives generally include both a blade and a handle, but the handle of some knives may be little more than an extension of the heel of the blade. The blade generally includes a tip, two sides, a back or back spine, and at least one cutting edge. The handle generally surrounds the heel of the blade in a substantially fixed position relative to the handle between opposing sides of the fixed-blade. Fixed-blade knives tend to be heavy, use-specific, user-specific, and both difficult and dangerous to carry and use unsheathed.
Knife designers and manufacturers of fixed knives have focused on the design and methods of manufacturing a sheath to provide safe, silent, rapid control storage, deployment and use of a fixed-blade knife using a single hand. Those who have considered sheaths have not advanced the teaching in the art.
For example, most sheaths for fixed-blade knives have proven to be expensive, unsafe, and unreliable for single-handed deployment and sheathing. Sheaths for fixed-blade knives have remained largely unchanged for generations, still tending to be made of leather, and designed more for appearance than for safe, silent, rapid control, storage, deployment and use of a fixed-blade knife.
Safety of the user of a fixed blade knife is of considerable concern among those who use knives. Many uses, particularly in military and law enforcement environments, require substantially silent removal of a knife from a sheath, as well as silent replacement of the fixed blade knife. Sheaths not designed for safe, silent, rapid deployment and uses of a fixed-blade knife are a major limitation in the market.
Perhaps because makers and manufacturers of knives have tended to focus on knife and handle design, rather than on sheath design, the knife industry as a whole seems to have concluded that solutions for single-handled draw of a fixed-blade knife cannot be improved. Little effort has been devoted to designing a sheath, and accompanying mechanisms associated with a sheath, to solve the problems associated with achieving single-handed removal of a fixed-blade knife from a sheath, reinsertion, and storage.
The limitations of the current state of the art become evident on using a fixed-blade knife using one hand. Current sheaths fail to assist a single-handed user in grasping, storing or holding the fixed-blade knife blade when not in use.
Therefore, a previously unaddressed need exists in the industry for a new and useful variably positionable holder for a non-folding tool, such as a sheath for a fixed-blade knife, that provides a user safe, silent, rapid control storage, deployment and use of a fixed-blade knife (collectively, “sheathing”) with one hand.